Have you noticed how many people are feeling more aches and pains, and being knocked out by the flu and hard hitting colds over the holidays? Any relationship to the season of high sugar intake....pies, breads, alcohol, fruit, grains, and holiday sweets? Indeed, it appears to be a holiday sugar epidemic. It's a very strong correlation that merits acknowledgment and inspired me to write a brief post about how to steer clear of inflammatory factors and direct one's life to vitality and resiliency.

The benefits extend far beyond reducing aches and pains, to preventing disease and cognitive decline, amplifying vitality/mood/energy and power.This is a huge topic, but some basic sound principles to start with are as follows;

Maybe you are thinking, "Eating fat won't make me fat? How can this be? Can it be true that eating delicious, high fat foods can turn me into a lean machine, with vital energy, robust immunity and be a shield against cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cognitive decline and more? Can it be true that I can spin the aging process on its head and gain an anti-aging edge"? Absolutely. By eating healthy fats, one upregulates the fat burning genes in the body, teaching the body to fuel itself with stores of body fat and ingested fats, sparing lean tissue, and keeping the brain functioning at a high level. Think coconut cream, macadamias, olive oil on leafy green salads, wild salmon, pasture raised meats, and avocados. Reducing grains and carbohydrates will reduce inflammatory factors (sugar, gluten, lectins and phytates/anti nutrients) and fuel the body with healthy nutrients for high energy, lean body composition, illness and disease resilience, and high cognitive function. By opting for nutrient dense vegetables as one' s carbohydrate source (Brussel sprouts, dark leafy greens, broccolli, cauliflower, sweet potatoes, yams, etc) antioxidant content is optimized, creating an anti-aging, fat burning beast!

Timing; by reducing the "Eating Window" , or the time span of when you are consuming food each day, you prolong the amount of fasting you do each day, allowing the body to repair and rebuild. Fasting, once fat adapted, is one of the most effective ways to upregulate one's health. This sets the body into clean and repair mode, even stimulating one's own stem cell growth. This might mean eating within an 8-10 hour period each day (ie 9-5) and then consuming only water/herbal tea. During a fast, the body has an opportuity direct its energy to cellular repair instead of metabolizing food.

2. Rest/Recovery; sleep is paramount. Prioritize high quality sleep. Eating as outlined above will enhance blood sugar and cortisol levels to optimize sleep quality. In addition to good sleep hygiene (going tech free two hours before bedtime, sleeping in a cool, dark room, sound proofing, reducing EMF's by turning off WIFI and setting phones in airplane mode) it is important to get day time sunlight to keep one's melatonin/cortisol rhythms in balance, and avoid the blue light of electronics at least two hours before bedtime.

4. Avoid chronic exercise. The stress of hard workouts creates an inflammatory response. This is a natural response to stress, and makes us stronger, but must be paired with ample recovery time between hard sessions. An intelligent program is filled with variety, technically precise movement, alternating between resistance training (springs/weights), sprinting every 7-10 days, and lots of low level movement throughout the day. Like many people, both Mark Sisson and I thought that more was better during our professional athletic careers; both of us suffered huge inflammation setbacks from over training and have learned much healthier ways of training. Here is a great article Mark Sisson wrote on the subject;

When we give our bodies the correct information, in alignment with how are genes are programmed to thrive, our bodies reward us with strength, favorable body composition, immunity, resiliency and vitality. Monitor the changes you choose to make each week, and observe the effects. The body is a healing machine when given the opportunity. Feel the power of determining your own health and vitality!

As things move into high gear with the holidays, stressors --both positive and negative-- abound. One of my favorite ideas around balancing stressors is to commit to daily fundamental keystone habits which set me in motion for a great day. Choose one or two key habits which you can commit to daily, such as early tech shutdown to ensure a great quality sleep, an anti-inflammatory meal to nourish and replenish you, a restorative movement practice like a walk on the beach, or mindful practice to stay centered, and enjoy the rewards that this investment will bring you.

Another way to reduce stress is home delivery of high quality grocery products at wholesale prices. Thrive Market is my favorite source, and their community donations are inspiring. Here is a link with a discount on your order; enjoy and thrive through the holidays!http://thrv.me/AqAudK

My new favorite book and so validating as to why I have chosen this path of unconventional medicine; rather than as an MD treating sickness and symptoms, as a health coach teaching people to thrive and optimize their lives through intelligent movement, nourishing food, quality sleep, and stress management.

The prevalence of chronic disease is rising at an alarming rate. Kresser outlines how this is due, in part, to a broken medical system, highly regulated by insurance companies and Big Pharma whose incentives are financial gain rather than human health. The other significant factor is the mismatch between our environment and our genetic biology. Three key environmental shifts have led to an upsurge in chronic, debilitating disease;

3. Sedentary lifestyle with a predominance of sitting. Solution; constant, low level movement throughout the day. Working out for an hour and then sitting all day ("Active but Sedentary")is a part of the problem. Keep moving. Your body, brain and spirit will reward you!

While these steps may seem simple, they lead to incredible rewards in health, reversing disease and fostering vitality, power, and energy physically and mentally. These steps demand discipline to implement, which is why working with a health coach to guide and motivate is tremendously helpful. Primal Health Coaches are leading the way to optimal health. Jump on board and thrive!!

As Thanksgiving approaches, I reflect upon a rigorous personal journey and the outcome with deep gratitude. I am now eighteen months post hip surgery and so very happily back in action. In hopes of inspiring others on a similar path, my story has been published alongside the chronicles of other professional dancers, at http://www.dancerhips.com/beamer.html.

An excerpt is here....

Powerful, elegant movement is the greatest gift to me. And therefore, it is the greatest gift I feel I can guide others to attain. Driven by my passion for the art and science of movement, I initially chose to pursue a career in medicine, intending to serve athletes and dancers. During my third year of medical school at UCSF, I received an incredible opportunity to dance in Paris, France. Though initially intending to go back to finish my M.D., my dance career had taken off, and was leading me to incredible new discoveries in the ways that I could contribute to the world. Seeing the excitement and gratitude in people's eyes in Belarus, Poland, Germany, Russia, Scotland, and the US, and hearing how performances brought new inspiration to their lives... feeling my mind and body focused in an extreme state of harmony...this fueled a new stage in my life, and I embarked on a fifteen year dance career, starting in Europe and evolving with Liss Fain Dance in San Francisco.Living as a dancer has instilled in me incredible respect for the power of the body to meet extreme demands, when given the proper information. Despite initial frustrations with pain and injury, I came to realize that the body truly wants to be healthy, and to do its very best for us at all times. When I realized that I could partner with my body, rather than fight with it, healing power became paramount. I now combine my love of science and medicine, with the art of elegant movement and healing through my work as a Pilates teacher and health coach, guiding others to optimize their own lives through movement and healthy lifestyle choices.Thanks to my all-star surgeon, Dr. Jason Snibbe, innovator of the Direct Superior Approach, my community, and health, I am now fourteen months post surgery (Bilateral hip replacements) and happily back in action. It is fascinating to learn to move powerfully again, integrating new high tech parts into the complex system of the body.I am astonished by how quickly this occurs and have written about the experience in my blog www.empowerpilatesmalibu.com.Here, on dancerhips.com, I share a series of these chronological blog entries in hopes of inspiring others on a similar path.This journey continues to deepen my respect for the body's power to heal, and generates empathy for those in pain, seeking the keys to unlocking their potential for powerful movement. Thank you to my incredible community for all the love and support you have shown me. I will forever remember the team of friends arriving at my door each day, radiant with healing energy, and nutritious foods to fuel me. May this entire experience make me a better guide to others, with more energy and knowledge to give back to my community.

Osteoarthritis is not a problem of the old, it is a problem of the active. The exciting part is that with attention, discipline and focus on empowering lifestyle and intelligent movement, everything keeps getting better. To those of you facing a challenge which may feel insurmountable, I encourage you to keep searching, dive deep for the answers, and never ever give up. Dedication and discipline are the gateways to freedom and opportunity. Knowledge truly is power, especially in the face of fear and the unknown.

The key is not to avoid falling. It is to get right back up, observe why we fell, and to go on climbing towards our dreams with more insight and resilience than ever before.

I extend gratitude to all of you, for your devotion to empowering yourselves with knowledge to optimize your lives through the art and science of intelligent movement, nourishing food, quality rest, and positive mindset. And gratitude for the power each of us has within ourselves to heal our bodies, to learn, and to move forward towards our highest goals and dreams.

This past weekend I stole away to remote beaches and mountains, immersing myself in astounding natural beauty to revitalize. It is here that some of my best ideas come to life. With a clear mind, playing in nature, I discover an open space to think, innovate, and assimilate complex concepts into streamlined strategies for optimizing health and human performance.

Alongside my hikes and swims, I dove into one of my all time favorite books,Supple Leopard, by Dr. Kelly Starrett. While at first glance, this appears to be a book for cross fitters and Olympic weight lifters, the concepts for creating stability and mobility in the body are extremely valuable for every human being. I highly recommend it to all. Dr. Starrett is a leader in physical therapy, coaching, and revolutionizing how athletes think about movement. In this book, he teaches readers to breathe, stand, lift, push and pull with proper technique. Dr. Starrett takes one through fundamental principles that harness the power of midline stability and torque through the joints, thereby preventing injury and taking performance to optimal levels.

I am teaching these principles as fundamental concepts to my pilates students, and use them daily in my own practice of weight training, pilates, ballet, and by extension, into my sports of rock climbing, hiking and swimming. They are invaluable, and like gems that I have, at last, found after a life time of competitive sports, dance performance, and professional health studies. This work is never ending and ever expanding. When I find a protocol that assimilates complex concepts into a streamlined strategy, I am compelled to teach it and share the knowledge.

In Supple Leopard, Kelly teaches principles to optimize human performance that can be extrapolated to all types of movement. These include;

1. Breathing

2. Midline Stability (or Core stability)

3. Stabilization of the Shoulder and Hip Joints by generating Torque

In my own practice, I enjoy teaching these principles and seeing students light up with new control and understanding of how to generate power in their bodies. By teaching students to breathe properly, expanding lung capacity and activating the diaphragm, one also guides a student to shift from sympathetic “fight or flight” mode, to parasympathetic mode where deep stabilizers can be retrained. Guiding students to identify neutral spine and pelvis, understanding principles of alignment, provides them with foundational points for navigating movement. Muscle resistance isometrics lead students to activate their deep core musculature, (the ‘inner corset”) Tranverse Abdominus.

Adding Dr. Starrett’s ideas, we activate full body stability and then layer on movement. Three pivotal concepts Starrett outlines are;

1. Torque/Hips; in Standing, feet parallel, screw the feet into the ground, as though the legs are screwdrivers, and reach into the floor as though one could spread it apart. This activates the glutes and deep hip stabilizers, and brings the pelvis into a neutral position.

2. Abdominal Bracing/Core Activation; generating tension in the Tranverse Abdominus, creating a corseting action of the ribs and abdominals

3. Torque/Shoulders; drawing the scapula (shoulder blades) down the back as though into one’s back pockets; when holding a bar, screwing the hands into the bar as though one could snap it in two. This spirals the eyes of the elbows and the armpits forward, and engages deep stabilizers of the shoulder and scapula on the ribs. This also applies to weight bearing on the arms in plank/ handstand positions; think of screwing the hands into the floor in external rotation. Deeply stabilizing to the shoulders.

For me, this breaks down to three distinct zones to visualize in any movement;

1. Glutes Activated

2. Abdominal Rib Connection

3. Shoulder Blades hugging the ribs and reaching down towards the hips

This can be a tricky trio to teach, but it is like striking gold when one finds it. By adding the two way stretch of pilates, lengthening up through the occiput, and down through the sacrum and legs, we set ourselves up for success in multiple dimensions and with all kinds of loads.

Expect nothing. Be ready for anything. By training ourselves with midline stability, breath, torque through the hip and shoulder joints, and two way stretch, we can access incredible strength and enjoy a lifetime of healthy, empowering movement.

With the array of diverging opinions on what a healthy approach to nutrition truly is, I turn to this easy- to-use chart, created by one of my personal guides in nutrition, Brandi Marshall.

Reseach into the principles of Primal Health, coupled with my own health turn around, lead me to find mounting evidence for the anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, immune boosting, hormone optimizing benefits of following this nutritional approach.

It is said that 80% of body composition is based upon food, in association with one's genetic profile. Food is very powerful. More so than most of us realize. Foods are essentially chemical compounds which influence how our genes will be expressed. It pays to be wise about what we expose our genes to! An essential first step is eliminating processed foods, sugars, and chemically altered oils from the diet. The changes in energy, mood, immune function, digestion, cognition and lean tissue will be rewarding! Aches and pain will diminish. Clarity of thought will heighten. Connective tissue (skin, ligaments, tendons, fascia) will become more elastic and resilient.

By focusing on the green zone foods in this list for 21 days, you can take an important step in reprogramming your genes towards optimal health. And create your own health turn-around! Here's to being vital!

Do you want to feel vital, clear, and happy? Who doesn’t, really?? The key lies in understanding how thought patterns are learned from experience, and how we can retrain the way we think, and hence, the way we feel. Our nervous system is constantly learning from what we choose to focus on, and its plasticity allows us to create systems we can thrive with.

How empowering it is to understand how our nervous system works and to be able to drive it towards our goals and well-being! And to realize that we can shift our own chemistry through the way we eat, move, sleep and think.

We are not passive recipients of the chemical orchestra inside our bodies. Rather, we are the captains of this ship, and have profound influence over the physiology of our bodies by the way we choose to interact with our environment, other people, and how we take care of ourselves. Indeed, our hormones, the chemical messengers of the body, are up-regulated or down-regulated by the stimuli or information we subject ourselves to. The science of epigenetics tells us that where we live, what we eat, how we move, sleep and think cause chemical modifications around genes, and effectively switch genes on or off. In essence, how we choose to live our lives influences how our genes are expressed. It pays to choose well!

A fascinating and inspiring book, The Science of Positivity, by neuroscientist Loretta Breuning, PhD, and founder of the Inner Mammal Institute, explains the keys to creating positive mindsets and thriving. Breuning teaches us how negative thought patterns form in our mammalian brains, to heighten our survival as a species, and how we can rewire and create a new model of positivity. Simple exercises lead to permanent shifts in neurochemistry, rewarding us with a flood of “happy chemicals”: serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin. Yes, we can change our chemistry by what we choose to think about and focus on. No pill required.

She outlines a fantastic exercise for permanently rewiring the brain;

*Three times a day, stop and spend one minute thinking of your positive responses to something you are experiencing. It is important to note your personal agency in the given experience. By trusting your own ability to navigate, rather than feeling the frustration of the world spinning around you, especially in the face of negative feelings, you shift the neurochemical soup flooding your brain and body.

Some examples include;

1. When I feel aggravated by someone, I think about my personal power to choose how I respond.

2. When I feel underappreciated, I think how this drives me to develop my innovation instead of resorting to the status quo.

3. When I feel anxious, I pause, note the emotion (shifting it from my primitive fight of flight brain center to my higher cortex) , think of a positive action to take, and then reward myself with a fun activity. This might be taking a walk in nature, listening to inspiring music, meeting up with a friend, dancing, or any healthy activity that floods my brain with rewarding feelings. Science tells us the reward chemicals teach our nervous system to repeat this method of responding to a stressful experience, in a more progressive way.

Breuning’s recipe calls for repeating this three times a day for one minute, over a period of six weeks straight. This teaches the brain to scan for positivity and empowering thoughts, effectively shifting the way you view the world, and therefore, the way you feel. New circuits will build if you give yourself a regular stream of new impulses.

This approach, noting a positive response to a situation (particularly a stressful one), shifts the chemistry flooding the brain and body form cortisol and stress hormones (which in excess can lead to inflammation, breakdown and disease), to the feel good chemicals, dopamine, seratonin and oxytocin. Not only do these make us feel good, but they teach us to repeat the behavior, shifting the way we think and respond in the future. Essentially, we can rewire our brains to positivity and happiness. And this leads to thriving health.

By instilling regular positive habits, we create mental grooves, or new boulevards in our neural pathways. In so doing, these new ways of thinking become speedy super highways. According to Breuning, “Prior pathways were built by chance experiences in youth. You can build new boulevards.”

Be thre driver of your own experience. Want to feel great? Build the pathways you want to follow and use them frequently!

What drives me: Inspiring people to be their personal best every day; guiding them to those "aha" moments, when the light goes on, and they accelerate towards personal goals. I aim to provide excellence in guiding people to heal themselves through movement--pilates and functional training--, to optimize human potential through movement, and to be a leader in educating and inspiring the public about health and wellness. My experience as a student at UCSF Medical School taught me a wealth of information about assessing states of health with great respect to the complex interconnected systems of the body and mind. My life as a professional dancer has allowed me to gain tremendous insight from my own body’s experience as a laboratory of injury and repair. My continuing education through pilates, personal training, the Gray Institute, and other functional medicine paradigms, add to the resources I bring when approaching each individual client. I have tremendous respect for the body’s ability to heal and restore homeostasis, or balance. I aim to guide people through a positive, pain free movement experience that is revitalizing, healing, empowering, and which advances the body's healing power, strength, mobility and overall performance; to help people get "unstuck" from a spiral of "dis-ease" and propel them forward to an optimal healthy, vital state of well being; to guide people to realize that even in the presence of injuries, or illness, we can move ourselves to optimal health, and live in a state of fitness, with lean, strong bodies and vibrant, strong minds, aligned and well. I aim to guide people to understand there are alternatives to surgery and/or medications and that efficient movement -- together with strategic nutrition, and positive lifestyle changes,--heals the body; to promote the philosophy that we can up regulate expression of the body's DNA, hormones, and biochemistry—the body’s intrinsic healing system-- on a deep cellular level, leading to enduring and profound advancements in health and, therefore, function.
And I just love seeing people light up with the joy of movement!!